Sooah Kwak is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Sooah’s research explores how infrastructures of containment come undone. She examines the social, material, and technoscientific systems built to isolate waste and other forms of disposability, and how these systems participate in the making and unmaking of value. By attending to moments of infrastructural failure, she traces how bodies and materials cast aside leak, endure, and reconfigure their place within constrained systems. Ultimately, her work asks what alternative imaginaries of living with and without one another might emerge from these ruptures. Prior to joining Penn, Sooah contributed to research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and worked on humanities-centered AI initiatives in Korea. She is also a multimedia artist whose creative practice informs her ethnographic work.